Monday, January 07, 2013

A Tale of Many Wrenthams

By Greg Stahl, Chairman, Wrentham Historical Commission

A few years ago my sister mentioned to me that she saw a Wrentham on an old map of Oregon. I forgot it for a few years and then recently remembered and decided to look into it. I found that there was a Wrentham Post Office stop on a branch of the Great Southern Railway just Southeast of The Dalles, OR, which is on the Columbia River. The freight station and a market were also named Wrentham and they serviced farmers who grew mainly wheat.

The post office is gone and the railway has been torn up. All that is left is a road named Wrentham Market Rd. and an intersection with Wrentham Cutoff Rd. There is a mega sized wheat farm there now, along with the old grain elevator. The local historian informed me that it was named Wrentham by a man maned Daniel Farrington who came from Maine. Farrington was the great great grandson of another Daniel Farrington who was from our Wrentham. The Wrentham, MA Farrington had a son who settled near Orono, ME on land he was given for his service in the Revolutionary War.

A bunch of young Wrentham soldiers and some more from Wilmington, MA brought wives from their hometowns and settled together in and around Orono, ME. In fact, there was a vote to name Holden, ME (just South of Orono) New Wrentham, which narrowly failed. This would have made four Wrenthams, as there is a Wrentham in Alberta, Canada, settled in part by our Wrentham people. There is the grandfather of them all, Wrentham, Suffolk, England, where at least two families who helped settle our Wrentham originally came from.

In researching Wrenthams, a fifth one came up. In 1955 the Royal Navy commissioned a minesweeper HMS Wrentham, which served until 1966 when it was decommissioned and sold. It was one of 93 minesweepers in the Royal Navy named after villages ending in "ham."